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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 March 2000 Issue No. 471 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 March 2000 Issue No. 471
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Interview Features Focus Heritage Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Juggling aims
By Mohamed Khaled
How to maintain the delicate balance between trade promotion within a free market economy and the social development so necessary within so many African nations? This is the major challenge facing COMESA, a challenge that has no quick-fix solutions or easy answers.
COMESA's origins lie in the 1970s, when the need for sub-regional economic arrangements became urgent as a result of three major developments. The collapse of federations in Eastern and Central Africa reduced political cooperation amongst states of the region, leaving a vacuum that needed to be filled. The de-stabilisation of the economies of southern African states -- an inevitable consequence of the policies adopted by apartheid South Africa -- reinforced the need for a sub-regional organisation capable of acting as an economic counter-weight to South Africa while the failure of earlier efforts to entrench sub-regional economic cooperation in Eastern and Southern Africa had the effect of forcing states to recognise that the only viable course was to reduce traditional economic dependence on the industrialised countries by promoting self-sustaining projects across all sectors.
The treaty establishing COMESA was signed on 5 November, 1993 in Kampala, Uganda and was ratified a year later in Lilongwe, Malawi on 8 December, 1994. It grew out of the Preferential Trade Area that had been in operation for a decade at the time, and so can be seen as part of an ongoing development that aims, eventually, to establish a fully-fledged economic community.
Yet the very name, COMESA, tends to promote the misconception that the grouping's mission is exclusively to promote regional trade, and this despite the fact that since the 1970s the general consensus has been that trade and economic growth cannot be achieved without social development. And COMESA's strategy, whatever the misconceptions, has been to pay considerable attention to socio-economic factors.
COMESA aims to eliminate member states' structural and institutional weaknesses by pooling resources together in such a way as to foster development. In this sense, COMESA can be viewed as an all-embracing development organisation involved in promoting cooperation across all relevant economic and social sectors.
The first COMESA Authority of Heads of State and Government adopted five basic objectives at its meeting held in Lilongwe, Malawi in December 1994, which outline the target of activities for the coming decade. These included significant and sustained increases in productivity in industry -- manufacturing, processing and agriculture -- in order to provide competitive goods for cross-border trade, create more jobs, and boost incomes.
Encouraging agricultural production has been a central plank of COMESA's strategy, with special emphasis on the joint-development of lake and river basins so as to reduce dependence on rain-fed agriculture. There are also new food security programmes at the provincial or district levels, as well as national and regional levels. Emphasis in COMESA programmes is also given to the development of transport and communication infrastructures and services, linking rural areas with the urban centres in each country, and member states with one another through new programmes for trade promotion geared to the private sector.
An important dimension to what one might term the African crisis is the extent to which the continent is conflict-ridden. The consequences of conflicts, which in many cases have flared into civil wars, have affected every aspect of life. Peace-building efforts must, therefore, go hand in hand with the economic aspects of reconstruction. The treaty establishing COMESA binds together countries which have agreed to cooperate in exploiting their natural and human resources. In pursuing these goals, then, COMESA recognises that peace and stability are basic requisites for trade and regional economic integration. In pursuit of these objectives, member states have agreed to adhere to the protection of human rights in accordance with the provisions of the African Charter of Human Rights, and, in recognition of the important role played by African women in economic development, gender issues have also been highlighted in COMESA's programmes. The extensive involvement of African women as small cross-border traders is an intrinsic part of COMESA's mandate, one that falls under the umbrella of Women in Business, a specialised committee of COMESA.
